Issue:
March 2025 | Cover story
The issue of ‘secret’ filming has ignited fresh controversy over Shiori Ito’s Oscar-nominated documentary Black Box Diaries
In 2018, a scandal erupted in Japan when a female reporter secretly recorded a conversation in which she was sexually harassed by Japan’s top finance bureaucrat. The reporter took her recording to a supervisor at TV Asahi who told her to drop it. Instead, she handed it to the weekly Shukan Shincho magazine, which published the tape, ending the career of Vice Finance Minister Junichi Fukuda and igniting a torrent of similar harassment stories.
The issue of unauthorized recordings, and of the wider journalistic ethics at stake, has returned with a vengeance this year with the controversy over Black Box Diaries, Shiori Ito’s Oscar-nominated documentary about her rape and its aftermath.
The film has been screened in more than 50 countries since its world premiere at a film festival in January last year. But not in Japan.
Ito's use of surveillance footage and secretly recorded audio and video recordings has made the documentary toxic in her own country. Most damaging is that the charge against BBD has been led by Yoko Nishihiro, who headed the legal team that represented Ito in her landmark civil lawsuit against Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a senior TBS reporter and biographer of Shinzo Abe. Ito was awarded damages against Yamaguchi in December 2019, a judgment finalized by Japan’s appellate courts in 2022. Nishihiro said she felt like she had been "completely torn apart” when she learned that the movie had been screened abroad, without the consent of several interviewees, after “trying so hard to protect [Ito] for eight and a half years”.
Nishihiro’s anger seems heightened by a sense of personal betrayal: her own voice is briefly heard (for about six seconds) in the movie, during an emotional cellphone call with Ito. In February, the lawyer told the FCCJ that Ito had not informed her of this and other recordings, adding that she and her client had jointly pledged to the Sheraton Miyako Hotel in Tokyo, where the assault took place, not to release CCTV footage showing Yamaguchi pulling the semi-conscious Ito out of a taxi and dragging her through the hotel lobby.
“As an attorney, my ability to continue working is based on my credibility and trust,” Nishihiro said of the Sheraton footage. “Losing that trust means that I can no longer represent the victims of sexual violence.” Nishihiro insisted she had secured a promise from Ito to remove the footage before the movie was released. Six months later, she was “deeply shaken” to see the footage and other scenes still included in a public screening last year at the University of Tokyo. It is extremely rare for an attorney to publicly attack her own client, and some have asked whether Nishihiro’s behavior also raises ethical questions.
There seems little dispute over what took place between Ito and her sources. Although a mental health crisis forced her to cancel an appearance at the FCCJ last month, she has since apologized to “those whose consent was overlooked,” and promised to release a redacted version that, presumably, will meet the legal requirements for screening in Japan. As for the hotel footage, she admitted that she did not have the hotel’s permission, but had digitally altered the footage to render it unrecognizable. “It is natural that there is varied criticism, but we decided to use it in the film, placing importance on the public interest,” Ito said.
Pointedly, she said she had decided to use the unauthorized material, believing it "essential" to conveying the reality of sexual violence in Japan.
It is clear to anyone who has seen the movie why Ito included the footage, whatever her former lawyer’s objections. It strongly supports her case that she was a victim of non-consensual sex, and was key in helping her win the civil suit. Ito reportedly paid ¥400,000 to edit the recording, an “outrageous” demand on a rape survivor, according to the movie’s producer Eric Nyari. Ito’s claims are further strengthened by her interview with a taxi driver (who was also secretly recorded sometime after the rape). In the clip, he recalls her groggy pleas on the way to the hotel to be dropped off at the station – requests that were overruled by Yamaguchi.
Filmmaker Atsushi Funahashi says much of the criticism of Ito seems academic and selective. CCTV footage of Ito walking steadily out of the hotel the following morning that was provided to Yamaguchi’s defense team as evidence was leaked on social media in an apparent attempt to smear her. That footage has been widely seen and remains online. The disputed footage of an apparently incapacitated Ito has now also been leaked and seen 25 million times.
According to Nyari, that has led more people to question “why the lawyers wanted to keep it away from the public”. He says the controversy over their decision to screen the footage should be seen within the context of Ito’s long, largely solitary struggle to reveal the treatment of rape. “What percentage of victims would have the strength to go and demand footage from the hotel?” he asked.
The row has exposed differences in how far documentary makers should go in their attempt to expose the truth – in this case a sexual assault that was complicated by the identity of the powerful man involved, in a country where victim blaming and insensitivity by the police often deters women from reporting crimes.
Yet Ito’s non-consensual use of her lawyer’s words and the hotel footage might well be given a pass elsewhere, given the gravity of the crime and the social context in which it occurred.
American filmmaker Miki Dezaki, who fought and won a protracted legal battle over the use of (approved) interviews in his film Shusenjo, argues that instead of publicly taking sides against Ito, Nishihiro and her team should be “calling for hotels and businesses to make it easier to obtain security camera footage of a crime, as refusing to do so would be obstruction of justice".
He adds: “It is reckless of Ms. Ito’s former lawyers to make Ms. Ito responsible for hotels refusing to give up footage to a future rape victim. This kind of rhetoric is severely harmful to a rape victim survivor like Ms. Ito, who would never want to make it more difficult for victims to obtain evidence.”
Another ally of the film's methods is Hiroyoshi Sunakawa, a professor of media theory at Rikkyo University, who said the unauthorized use of images was "permissible in the pursuit of the truth" in some cases.
"In the case of sexual violence occurring behind closed doors, I think this may be the case," Sunakawa told the Kyodo news agency. "The role of journalism is to raise awareness about social issues to the world.” If the film is not released in Japan, he added, "it probably will only make the perpetrators (of sexual assaults) happy”.
Black Box Diaries has yet to get a release date in Japan, where the media has shown little of the enthusiasm that would doubtlessly have followed an Oscar nomination for, say, an anime. Nyari says the documentary has been “preemptively suppressed”.
Dezaki said he would suggest edits to the original BBD. Writing on the Shinsho Plus website, he said Ito, “as an adult and sexual assault survivor, took a risk, as many artists do, to make art that expresses their life and experience, and I understand that there may be people who feel wronged by the film, but they can make their own decision to speak out or take legal action. And the public and media can discuss and debate the public value and ethics after watching the film, but first the film needs to be screened in Japan”.
Funahashi agrees that the film deserves widespread release here. “As someone who has seen the footage, I can attest that the sight of Ito in an intoxicated state and Yamaguchi dragging her out of a taxi was nothing short of shocking – essentially, it is footage of the crime scene itself. By global legal standards – and even by Japan’s current laws – this footage provides undeniable evidence of a crime. Its public interest is indisputable.
“While there are legitimate concerns regarding unapproved footage, I hope the producers can navigate these challenges to secure broader distribution. It must be seen, discussed, and acted upon.”
Ito, who will learn whether her film has won an Oscar on 2 March, has again found herself pushing back against deep-seated resistance to honest debate about power and sexual abuse. The controversy is being played out like a repeat of the journey she tells with such conviction in Black Box Diaries.
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional Activities Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Justin McCurry is Japan and Korea correspondent for the Guardian and the Observer. He is the author of War On Wheels: Inside Keirin and Japan’s Cycling Subculture (Pursuit Books, June 2021), published in Japanese as Keirin: Sharin no Ue no Samurai Wārudo (Hayakawa, July 2023).
